Cruel World (97 page)

The disillusionment of return was devastating for middle-class Jewish children too. Marian Helft and her family, hidden by friends in the Hungarian and Slovakian borderlands, had escaped deportation under harrowing circumstances. Liberated by the Russians, they decided to go home to Budapest, even though their house had been destroyed by bombs. Marian, eleven, sustained by the “brilliant image” of that city as she remembered it and as her parents had spoken of it, was excited at the prospect. The trip back was far from luxurious. They went by horse cart, in an open and freezing freight car in which they had to lie on artillery shells, and then in the locomotive of another train, which was so hot that they could not touch the walls or sit down. They arrived in a bad, dirty neighborhood of Budapest in the very early morning. It was hardly brilliant. The first thing Marian saw in the dusty gloom was a “woman with a shaved head pushing a cart loaded with her belongings,” a vision she has never forgotten. After a long walk, they arrived at her grandparents’ apartment, which consisted of three small rooms. Marian sat down and cried. When the family asked why she was crying, she said it was because her feet hurt, but it was really because her dream of coming home to “something brilliant” had been dashed.
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Marian’s family was lucky to have the three rooms. Many other Jewish survivors found their houses destroyed or occupied by strangers. In most areas, in the first postwar years there was no way of evicting such squatters, and the former owners were forced to seek shelter elsewhere. The furnishings of the houses had also migrated. It was not unusual for the neighbors to serve the returnees tea from cups that they recognized as their own. Friends to whom valuables had been entrusted suddenly developed amnesia about such arrangements, especially if the claimant was very young. In Poland and other Eastern European countries, returning Jews were often greeted not with sympathy, but with surprise that they were still alive. This atmosphere made clear that it would be better to leave, but many, full of hope, were determined to await the possible return of parents and children to what had been home before departing once again. More often than not, the wait was futile.

Wherever they were, Jewish children who had been hidden on the Continent or taken to England on the Kindertransports waited with trepidation
for news of their parents. By 1943, most of the Kindertransport children had stopped receiving mail from their parents. After the war, letters from remote relatives, messages from strangers, and official notifications little by little made clear to many that they had become orphans. The fact of their parents’ death, in a place and manner unknown, was hard to absorb. Some children did not want to know the details. “I have never been able to face with equanimity photographs, newsreels, etc., of concentration camps for fear of discovering my mother’s fate,” one said.
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Others did not want to admit the truth to themselves. Isaac Levendel, the little boy who had been hidden with French farmers, did not ask about his mother: “I was afraid of the answer I might get, and since I did not want anyone to destroy my fantasies, silence was the best way to hold on to my dreams.” Although he could acknowledge that she had “disappeared,” it was not until he overheard his father and the woman who would become his new wife discussing how to obtain a death certificate for his mother that “my mother and her death were explicitly connected.… My blood froze in my veins, and I wanted to shout that this was a lie and drown out their voices.… Instead, I lowered my head and concealed my emotions. I retreated into the silence I had imposed upon myself since my mother’s departure.”
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For children who had spent five or more happy years with foster parents, the news of their parents’ fate led to mixed emotions. One nine-year-old, told with trepidation by her foster mother that her parents and all her relations, whom she hardly remembered, had perished, said, “Oh, now I can stay with you.” Her astounded foster mother wrote, “The tragedy was that she heard the news with relief.” But it was not quite so simple. For some days afterward, she found the little girl crying at night. When she asked why, the child said: “I don’t want you to die.”
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Older children were sometimes so upset at the thought of leaving their foster families that their surviving parents did not insist. When parents and children did meet again, relationships could be difficult. The children who had been in England for years no longer felt Austrian, German, or Czech; many had forgotten their original language. Mothers and foster mothers were mutually jealous, and the children often felt guilty when they were unable to love both equally. Young exiles who were at university, or were beginning careers, sometimes resented having to drop everything and deal with relations who turned up in desperate shape after their wartime experiences. For parents who found the docile little children they remembered transformed into streetwise teenagers, the relationships
could be hard to revive. Sad to say, in many cases, after five or six years of war and separation, the bonds were too frayed, and the families never lived together again, but contented themselves with visits, as if they were remote cousins.

The evacuated Jewish children would go in many directions and settle in many countries, but they do have some things in common. They, like most refugees and transients, feel that they do not “belong” where they have settled, but for them there is an added element:

Most of the small British evacuees started home in 1944. One nurse who had taken care of a whole houseful of toddlers in the countryside proudly noted that they were going home to London toilet trained and with greatly improved table manners.
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The “Bundles from Britain” who had been sent to the United States gradually went home too. The teenagers among them, by now deeply involved in the life of American high schools, often wished they could stay. For all, the longed-for return was bittersweet: “I had two sets of parents.… I had a past that was hardly known to my American family and rapidly accumulating experience … in Ohio that would never be totally conveyable to my parents in England.”
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Eleven-year-old Anthony Bailey and a number of other boys went home in October on an escort aircraft carrier loaded with replacement aircraft. For security reasons their departure and arrival dates were kept secret. The trip was exciting, as the crew made the lads part of their routines and kept them busy. They sat in the planes, were shown how the guns worked, and played endless games of British Monopoly. There was a frightening torpedo alert. Despite the secrecy, Bailey’s mother was on the dock when the ship arrived at Glasgow. As would all too often be the case, he did not recognize her:

The phenomenon of detachment affected children from every country, and the impetus did not always come from the child. Parents’ lives also had changed and made family relations difficult. One English girl returned home from America, where she had been sent at age two, to a mother and stepfather she had forgotten, as well as two new siblings. Before he was killed on D-Day, her own father had remarried and had two sons, whom she would not meet until 1999. Her mother and stepfather eventually emigrated to South Africa. The little girl did not go with them, but went back to her American foster mother, a generous lady who loved the English girl as her own and gave her every advantage. She also sent financial help to her family, whose farm in South Africa did not thrive. The child did see her relations from time to time, but she stayed in the United States. There she lives happily, but does admit, with a certain sadness, that she sometimes thinks of herself as having been “bought.”
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The problems of families were hard, but the fact that they existed, even in another place, was better than the awful loneliness of having no one. A host of children’s homes, orphanages, and agencies would care for those who had no parents, but no organization can replace family, no matter how dysfunctional. The most loving social workers or directors of children’s homes are not parents, but employees, and they retire and change jobs. If their charges had become fond of them, such changes, devastating enough when there was some hope that parents would return, were far worse once that hope was gone. Children under the care of the most conscientious organizations tended to be moved from one place to another like so many sacks of potatoes. They were thought of in categories such as age group, religion, nationality, or gender rather than as individuals. From time to time, relatives or old family friends might appear and the child would be “taken out” for meals or other entertainments. But as one girl in France, who had by 1946 been in three foster families and six institutions, said of her parents’ friends, who, with the best intentions, had helped her in various ways, “Not one person ever asked me if I would like to live with them. I felt like a leper.”
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Institutional care was also finite. In many places, orphans were expected to start working at age fourteen. By eighteen, an orphan was considered an adult capable of taking care of himself and any stipend going to
foster parents or institutions for his care ended. Only a lucky few would manage to get scholarships and other perks of higher education, much less find a family to live with. The Kindertransport children in England were the first to experience this enforced independence. They worked in every kind of menial job, which a plethora of agencies helped them to find, often sending out little résumés, such as the following, supplied to a potential sponsor in New York by the Children’s Marrainage Scheme in London, of which Mrs. Lionel Rothschild was president:

The practical option of food and lodging led one girl in England to take a job as a chambermaid in a boardinghouse. Another managed to get into a residential nursing school that combined training and paid employment. Some had no idea how to budget their tiny salaries. One sixteen-year-old boy, out on his own for the first time, lived on cornflakes for months. For young refugees who were not provided rooms by their employers, finding a place to live was daunting:

Above all, such young people, with only organizations and committees of strangers to talk to for advice and comfort, were terribly isolated, especially when it came to holidays and social life, and would have to build their own family-like structures, bit by bit. Walter Nowak, a Polish forced laborer who emigrated to the United States, later said:

The children of collaborators suffered from a different kind of loneliness. Their parents’ politics had made them outcasts and sometimes de facto orphans in their own land. In the first days after liberation, such boys and girls, even very young ones, were treated with hostility and contempt. Many had to be taken out of school. In a phenomenon common to all of Europe, girls who had gone out with German soldiers had their heads shaved and, surrounded by mocking crowds, were marched through the streets. In Holland an estimated 150,000 people were arrested as collaborators, not always with good reason. Most were subjected to mob humiliation and some were beaten, but this sort of scene was repellent to most citizens and was soon prohibited by the authorities. If both parents were detained, their children twelve and over were taken with them to the detention camps. Some 20,000 younger children were sent to children’s homes or foster families where they were not always well treated. In the camps, some members of the Dutch Nazi Party (NSB) also had their heads shaved and painted with orange stripes. NSB members who had fled to Germany were returned with their families and incarcerated with the others in the camps, including Westerbork, the notorious deportation camp, where surviving Jews made the collaborators follow the same brutal routines that they had been forced to endure.
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It was in these enclosures that many of the children first learned the dreadful details of the activities of their parents and their German colleagues. One group of teenagers was taken to see the exhumed bodies of Dutch hostages the Germans had executed, and shown atrocity pictures from the liberated concentration camps. The stigma of their parents’ actions would stay with many of these children for the rest of their lives: